It is that time of the year again, I’m now officially 29 years of age!

I woke up this morning slightly bleary eyed to Claire and Hugo wishing me a happy birthday which is fantastic. Being some what of a present fanatic, Claire thought I should open a present immediately and I obliged and received the following completely kick arse gifts:

• A medium sized box of Ferrero Rocher. After the walloping I took over Christmas with great food and fantastic sweet treats, I couldn’t have possibly managed a massive box again like last year.
• Two recent framed photos of Hugo to put on my desk at work, which I love dearly – he is a handsome little man.
• A Nintendo Wii with the Wii Sports game and a second Wii Remote. This was a joint venture between Claire’s family and it was completely unexpected – I would have been more than happy with the first two presents.

We set about our morning routine with Hugo and we had pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast. Once that was done, I had to open the Nintendo Wii box, to make sure everything was in order of course. I was impressed with the neat boxing of the components and now easy it was to setup. More importantly, it worked but that took a couple of hours to verify!

As is the tradition, we went to Hogs Breath for lunch which is located on the Gold Coast spit beside Marina Mirage. When I booked, the lady at Hogs Breath mentioned that there was a lot of traffic around today – fantastic to know. I flicked off an SMS to everyone and we were soon on our way. To our surprise, as soon as we got to the M1 overpass at Upper Coomera we could see that all south bound lanes on the M1 were nose to tail and moving very slowly. We later heard on the radio that a car had burst into flames on the motorway and emergency services were on the scene – sure fire way to stop a major arterial if there ever was one.

To get around the huge backlog of traffic, we slipped along the service road and onto Hope Island Road. Fortunately the road was clear but a much slower driving speed as it isn’t a highway. After suffering through a moderate amount of heavy traffic coming through Southport, we managed to make it to Hogs Breath about 20 minutes late.

Andrew and Belinda travelled from Ipswich for lunch, braving the horrific traffic which was great and as a present said they’d help pay for a replacement graphics card since mine finally broke recently. Brendan rode in on his new Kawasaki Ninja, he of course didn’t have to suffer the traffic but he did play on my love of coffee and gave me a couple bags of chocolate coated coffee beans! Kylie, Brett, Hollie, Blake and Summer also joined me for lunch, Blake napped most of the time but Summer was full of beans – she is gorgeous.

Arriving home, Lucy was here waiting for us – which was a little senendipitous as we hadn’t arranged it at all but she arrived only minutes before we got home. Following on from the Nintendo Wii theme, Lucy and Michael gave me WWE Smackdown Vs Raw – which is an American wrestling game for those who don’t follow it. I had a quick game of it but got completely hammered, wasn’t as easy to pick up as tennis or boxing!

I’ve had a great 29th birthday and I’d just like to thank everyone who travelled to the Gold Coast, phoned, SMS’d, instant messaged, emailed and offered well wishes for my birthday. I can say that I have been absolutely spoiled rotten – thank you to everyone for the great presents.

Next year I’ll be knocking on the door of the big three zero!